The Uniformity of Children's Attitudes toward Physical Disabilities

Abstract

A study by Richardson, Goodman, Hastorf, and Dornbusch (1961), reporting remarkable uniformity of children's attitudes toward physical disability, was in part replicated by the study reported in this article. The subjects, 42 physically handicapped boys and girls attending a summer camp, were asked to give their preference rankings of six drawings of children displaying the presence or absence of various types of disability. When the data were analyzed according to the statistical methods used by Richardson et al. (1961), the results of this study seemed to support their conclusions. However, additional analyses carried out on the present data suggest that the attempt to posit a basic cultural uniformity in the ranking of these six pictures may have been in error.